Steam and EA's Origin Hit by DDoS Hack Attacks

PC gaming platforms Steam and Origin have both been subjected to distributed denial-of-service attacks, causing sporadic downtime for both platforms and leaving gamers twiddling their thumbs for all the wrong reasons.

Credit for the attack on Valve's Steam has been claimed by Twitter users @chFtheCat and @LARCENY_, bringing the service down for around on hour earlier today. The pair have also linked themselves to a previous attack on Blizzard's Battle.net, used to log into games like World of Warcraft and Diablo III.

A parallel (though seemingly unrelated) attack was launched on EA's Origin, with a group calling itself DerpTrolling claiming responsibility. It proved more effective, causing sporadic outages of Origin for nearly 24 hours.

The motivations behind the attacks? Just the Lolz for the time being it seems, with neither party yet revealing reasoning behind the disruptions. Being run by the "evil machine" of gaming, EA, Origin is always an easy target for hackers looking to cause some mischief. But Steam, that's different -- Valve are the good guys, right? [Guardian]